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FILM: The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick)


Will

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I was originally planning to post this in the "last film you watched" thread, but it got too long! 

 

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I watched this for the first time several days ago. I suspect it will become one of my most treasured films as time goes on. 

 

The Tree of Life, the first Malick film I had seen, was incredibly boring to me. As I've noted here, however, I still enjoyed it overall because of its very interesting philosophical messages.

 

But The Thin Red Line takes things to another level, containing plenty of heart-pounding drama (e.g. the battles and the wife's letter) but still leaving lots of room for peaceful reflection. It's the best of both worlds. Additionally, I find the philosophical ideas here even more interesting than those in Tree

 

This is one of those films that I was excited to finish because I wanted to research interpretations of it. Very cool. Reading such articles, I was introduced to the work of Martin Heidegger, a philosopher who is presumed to have heavily influenced Malick. I no doubt will eventually dive into Heidegger's body of work, and thus the influence of this film on me will be far-reaching.

 

Before seeing the film, I'd read that some critics had called it unfocused, and I can definitely see where they were coming from. Characters appear and disappear at a dizzying rate. I often wondered what character I was seeing. 

 

I think you could see this as a flaw, but more positively you could also see it as Malick's challenge to the conventions of filmmaking -- that there has to be a very clear story. Oftentimes when watching movies people get very anxious when they don't realize who is speaking, because they feel like they're missing something. But here Malick basically shows that ultimately it's the ideas that matter. The speaker of the words is only important insofar as it informs our understanding of the words -- and in many cases, I think, if we reflect on this point, we will realize that knowing who the speaker is or their backstory doesn't matter so much after all. 

 

This film is perhaps the epitome of the type I suggested in my long "film and emotion" post here: A film that revels in each individual moment, a director that follows his intuition, who doesn't really care about the story of the battle. 

 

The cinematography here is quite incredible at times. Guadacanal is such a "strange" choice for a setting, given that the battle isn't very well known (I'm a history buff, so of course I knew about it, but I'm not sure how many do). Yet it's the perfect choice. Some of the shots during the hill battle are so peaceful and serene. When the soldiers dart through the beautiful meadow, it almost looks like it would be fun, like it's just a game. But then the artillery hits.

 

Additionally, as I believe Ebert noted in his review, the sense of geography established during the battle is quite incredible. 

 

Perhaps my favorite shot from the film was the one where the soldier with the wife back home walks between the palm trees, thinking of her. The lighting reminds me of a video game (specifically, the PGA Tour golf ones), and I don't mean that negatively. Rather, I mean that it's the kind of other-worldly, perfect scene that I previously thought could only be rendered with computers. Yet Malick did it with natural light. 

 

Zimmer's score works very well during that scene as well ("Light"). I'm not as big a fan of the score as, say, TGP, at least as of today, but I think it's very good and more than sufficient for the film. The "Journey to the Line" scene is really quite incredible -- I can think of few other times where directors have allowed a composer to write such a long flowing, building piece without making schizophrenic cuts. (As a side note, I wonder whether J.J. Abrams was inspired by it when working on TFA's opening scene (village attack). There are some very similar shots there. Did anyone else notice that?)

 

Back to the topic of Zimmer's score, does anyone know where "The Village" was supposed to go in the film before it was cut? That was my favorite track on the album and I was disappointed not to hear it in the film. 

 

I now want to discuss the last fighting sequence, the one along the river (yes, I realize this review is a bit rambling). Somehow the way Malick filmed it was so utterly terrifying, the image of those Japanese troops emerging in a line. You really got a sense of how alone and exposed the Americans felt. It was almost like a nightmare.

 

Lastly, I want to touch on some of the philosophical aspects. First, the narration: Like in The Tree of Life, if I am being honest I have to say that it comes across as very corny. However, that's not necessarily a failure of the film. When you're culturally conditioned to hear contemplative voice-overs as corny, they will be corny to you. So I kind of had to try to overcome that bias in order to appreciate the voice-overs. 

 

Somewhat counter-intuitively, to end this post I will discuss the opening sequence. Private Witt has gone AWOL and is living with islanders. He seems very happy, and Faure's beautiful "Requiem" plays (this was how I was introduced to it!)

 

I wonder if here Malick might be making a commentary on the corrupting nature of large-scale human society, and on the pure, joyful nature of living in a remote place with a small tribe and nature all around. If not, it could be that I'm just reading my own present views into the film. As a postmodernist, I tend to agree with the bleak views Sgt. Welsh (Sean Penn) takes. For example, the statement, "All a man can do is find something that's his and make an island for himself" (I may be paraphrasing) fits almost perfectly with of lot of the recent Daoist reading I've been doing. So does the idea of nature's indifference, which is both espoused by Welsh in dialogue and seemingly suggested by Malick in some of his shot choices.

 

However, I tend to agree with Witt when he suggests that we can still see beauty in things. In other words, I might agree that "everything is a lie," but I wouldn't agree that that necessarily has to be an extremely negative position. 

 

I wonder: Which character is Malick sympathetic to? Who is the viewer "supposed" to be sympathetic to (if anyone)? Malick is almost certainly sympathetic to Witt, but what does he think of Welsh's views? Welsh isn't portrayed very positively in the film, but given that Malick loves to challenge film conventions, I can't be sure if that means he's supposed to be viewed as in the "wrong." Furthermore, Welsh lives and Witt dies. I wonder if Malick might agree with both Welsh and Witt -- that, for example, war may be just over "f---ing property," but that doesn't mean you can't find beauty and goodness in it if you try. 

 

Because of Malick's incredibly mysterious nature (which is probably a good thing, allowing the viewer to interpret things however they like), it's hard to say what he thinks about any of this. Perhaps when I read some Heidegger I will find a few clues, who knows. 

 

I wonder, what did he see in film that made him quit formal philosophy? What was he doing during those twenty years of "inactivity"? What was he thinking about, what did he come up with? How many years did he spend agonizing over the philosophical questions that get only a few hours of space in his films? 

 

I can identify with Malick because I think about those questions too, day after day after day. I think that in him, I see a little bit of myself. 

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The wife subplot is the worst part of the film. Meandering filler.

 

But everything else is absolutely divine. My favourite war film.

 

And the the film wouldn't have been nearly as effective without Zimmer's score. Had a big write-up about it I was working on. Will get back to it when I get the chance.

 

One of the moments that stick most with me is when the Japanese enter in that one static shot to the sound of descending fifths:

 

 

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13 minutes ago, KK said:

One of the moments that stick most with me is when the Japanese enter in that one static shot to the sound of descending fifths:

 

 

 

Yeah, that's the "nightmarish" moment I referred to. 

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" The Village" was written for the scene near the end when Witt revisits the Islanders, who now fear him.

Wonderful music that I believe contains a variation on the Faure theme.

Unfortunately, it was replaced in the finished film

 

 

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